First Cheque : A 2020 Review

Pheeeww!! What a year. I don’t think any of us saw that coming ??

What started as any other year ended up putting most of humanity under cruel lockdowns, left millions dead from a strange new virus, many more lost months being sick & millions more lost their lives and livelihoods. This was truly the most turbulent time in my 31 years on this planet.

The startup world of course was not insulated. In the FC Portfolio we had founders getting infected with COVID, spending weeks in the hospital with their entire families infected — some even lost loved ones to this dreadful virus. On the business end too it wasn’t easy. So many founders had to lay-off people for no fault of their’s, so many companies had to make pivots. Some also had to shut shop since their customers shut shop.

It was truly inspiring to see founders pull through this as the world went into complete chaos. We have teams in the portfolio that saw their business go to complete Zero for an entire quarter and by December of 2020 they are doing 200+% of their pre-COVID numbers. I know it’s cliche to say it now but this definitely was one of the toughest years ever for businesses worldwide and those that survived it — 2021 will be the time to thrive.

For First Cheque this was quite an eventful year to say the least!

• We started our operations in December 2018 and up until end of 2019, we had done a total of 23 investments through a network of about 10 Venture Partners (founder angels who decide where we invest — More here in our operating manual).
• We added some amazing New Founder Angels to our Venture Partner network like — Vidit Aatrey (Meesho), Pravin Jadhav (PayTm Money) & Deepak Diwakar (MindTickle)! We expanded our network of Venture Partners to 20!
• Then COVID hit us, April, May and June were just zero months with no new investments. Everyone was figuring out this work-from-home-with-kids thing and there was just too much uncertainty around to do any angel investments.
• But July onwards, the investment activity rebounded with a vengeance! In 2020 we almost doubled our rate — we ended up doing 43 new investments!
• 43 Investments meant we were averaging almost 4 deals a month — pretty much one new YES every week.

Here are some of the companies we invested in 2020 classified under some broad themes:

India Consumer

• DrinkPrime : Pay-As-You-Go Internet Connected Water Purifier
• YoloBus : Managed MarketPlace for Inter-City Bus Travel
• Zealthy : Women’s Health Platform for Mass Market India
• NIFLR : Unmanned Automated Retail Stores
• AbleJobs : Job Prep App for Grey Collar Jobs
• Leap.club : Professional Networking and Upskilling Platform for Women
• O’ Be : Ready-to-Drink Packaged Cocktails Brand for India
• SkillBee : Jobs Platform for Foreign Blue Collar Jobs
• Hea Boosters : Nutraceutical Challenger Brand for Indian Women
• FreshOk : Fresh Fruits and Vegetables for Urban Indian Middle Class
• SuperK: Chain of Tech-Enabled Kirana Stores

India B2B/SME

• Picxy : Stock Photo Marketplace for India
• EazyPG : Easy to use property management Software for India
• Refrens : Marketplace for White Collar Service Professionals
• Biddano : Marketplace Connecting Pharmaceutical Distributors, Retailers and Brands
• Connectedh : SAAS for Diagnostic Clinics
• Saveo : Marketplace for Pharmaceutical Distributors, Retailers and Brands
• UnDisclosed : Marketplace connecting Fashion Brands to Manufacturers
• Kaagaz : Document Scanning and Organizing App for India
• Anar : Professional Networking platform for India SMEs
• EDLP : Tech-Lead Distribution for Kirana Stores

Deep-Tech

• The Eplane Company : Building Electric Airplanes for Intra-City Mobility

EdTech

• HobSpace : Managed Marketplace for Extra-Curricular Activities at Schools
• FlashPrep : Study App for K-12
• Yellow Class : Free Online Hobby Classes Platform for Children

Fin-Tech

• Insta-Salary : Salary Advance App for Blue and Grey Collar Employees
• UnDisclosed : NeoBank for Indian Millennials
• UnDisclosed : Helping Hospitals claim faster and more from Insurers

Global SAAS

• Mauna.ai. : Developer Friendly API for Integrating Voice Bots into your App
• UrbanYogi : Mindfulness and Meditation Coach for the world
• Deepsync : AI that clones Human Voice and automates Audio Production
• CustomFit.ai : No-Code platform for B2B Website Personalisation
• MailModo : No-Code Platform for building Interactive Apps within Email
• CreatorOS : Enabling Creators to launch their own apps & sell live/recorded content
• Kaching : Making ‘Word of Mouth’ marketing trackable
• Undisclosed : Customer Onboarding/Success SAAS Platform for SAAS products
• Bitespeed : Messenger Marketing for Shopify Stores
• Undisclosed : General-purpose virtual assistant that gets things done faster

Gaming

• Tamasha : Enabling Creators to build and launch their own Live game Shows
• Chirrup : Play Casual Games with Friends Over Video Chat!

Health Tech

• Habbit : Health & Fitness Platform & Products
• Prescribe : Bringing Hospitals and Doctors online via Whatsapp
• The Healthy Company : Fitness Platform and Products for India

Now for some stats, Out of these 43 investments:

• 39 were Pre-seed rounds (<$500K raised) and 4 were Seed Rounds with a VC firm leading with a sizeable $500K+ cheque.
• We said YES to 20 companies before they had a product launched

We were truly the “First Cheque” i.e. we participated in or lead the first external funding round, in 39 out of these 43 companies.

• We co-invested with Marquee Funds like Accel, SAIF, Matrix, Nexus, India Quotient, 3One4 and more in 8 of these companies while others either had a Syndicate/ Super Angel Leading the round or were just smaller angel rounds.
• In 17 Cos, we made the introduction to the investors who ended up leading the round.
• 4 of our companies were accepted into Y Combinator this year.
• 9 Companies have already raised/signed termsheet for a marked up follow-on round after our investment. Some seriously good names like Omidyar Network, Sequoia Surge, Nexus Partners, India Quotient invested in our portfolio — sometimes just weeks after we did. Some of the rounds announced publicly were :

1. YoloBus Raised from Nexus and India Quotient
2. Kaagaz raised from Pravega.vc
3. DrinkPrime Raised from Sequoia Surge and Omidiyar Network
4. AbleJobs raised from Elevation Capital (Earlier SAIF Partners)
5. SuperK raised from Strive.vc
6. Yellow Class raised from India Quotient

.. and other unannounced ones!

Out of the 23 companies we invested in 2019, 13 have now closed follow-on rounds — most of which happened in 2020. Some of Cos that announced their rounds are :

1. Fleetx raised multiple rounds from India Quotient and Beenext

2. Astrogate raised a follow-on from SpecialE Invest

3. Giva raised multiple follow-on rounds from India Quotient

4. Bellatrix Aerospace Raised from Parampara Fund

5. Mall91 raised from Beenext, Kalaari and Go Ventures

Some other Notable highlights from the portfolio :

• Kutuki got a shout out from India’s influencer in chief — PM Modi himself!
• Astrogate announced it will have it’s first launch in 2021!
• GIVA hired Neha Kakkar as it’s brand ambassador!
• Kaagaz blitzed past 1M downloads!

On the fund & Operations side :

• We significantly increased our cheque size from an average of Rs 25L to now an average of Rs 50Lakhs by opening up our deals to angel investors on the AngelList India platform. If you would like to invest with First Cheque — you can send us a request on AngelList India here.
• About 200+ people now back our syndicate on AngelList. For about 80% of our deals, we now also syndicate more money on AngelList apart from the Venture Partner and FC Fund’s investment.
• We held our First Demo Day in February, to help our startups meet VC/Investor friends from the ecosystem in Bangalore. Feels like it was years ago now.(Precovid world… sigh)
• Our record from first founder call to money in the bank was set in July — Four days! Hope to beat this in 2021! ??
• To make it easy for founders to raise from us — we launched an Operating Manual!  Multiple founders just “got it” and actually followed the process and won our cheque!

Now for some Lows in 2020 :

• Three of the Companies we funded in 2019 had to shut shop in 2020 — two had a cofounder conflict situation and one just couldn’t survive COVID.
• At least two more are barely alive. We really hope they will pull through this but the odds look bleak ??
• For a variety of reasons — Out of our 43 investments, only 4 teams have a woman co-founder. ??
• At least doubling this ratio to 20% is my personal goal for 2021.
• I was supposed to launch a series of videos explaining Termsheets for first time founders but just didn’t get the bandwidth to launch it. This will now be live in January!

Phew! Writing all this down — can’t help but feeling like this was a long - long year! I can’t thank our founders, Venture Partners, LPs and our partners at AngelList India enough for making all this happen!

Saving the best for last — here’s all the love from founders we got which kept us going through this dreadful year!

On that note — Happy New Year Folks! Looking forward to partnering with many more talented Indian Founders in 2021! ??

Can’t wait to see what they build next ??

Jai Hind! ????